The glacial pace of this project continues… I haven’t done too much in the past month for lack of finances, but here’s what little is new since the last time.

Here’s what the exhaust crossover looked like before and after a trip through the blasting cabinet. You figure out which is which…

The exhaust manifolds get the same treatment, both to clean them up and to give some ‘tooth’ and open up the pores for the coating they’ll soon receive. I made sure to mask the machined surfaces of the manifold in order to keep them as flat as possible and hopefully prevent leaks. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to use gaskets or not when I put it all back together, though.

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Most of the time, the links my dad sends me are, well, the kind of links your dad sends you. Occasionally, though, my dad sends me gems…

You might assume at first that this is a video of a model airplane. It isn’t. There’s a guy in there. A very lucky, very cool-under-pressure, very talented guy.

I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a job where wearing a pair of pants with a built-in tourniquet in each leg is a good idea…

Blackhawk also makes a matching shirt, which is handy for the tactical needle drug enthusiast, too.

Take your pick - the pants and shirts are $90 each at Blackhawk.

I’ve recently wasted a lot of time in a flame war (pun intended) on Yellow Bullet about heating nitrous oxide bottles with a propane torch. For the uninitiated, a cold nitrous bottle screws up your tune-up, because the pressure in the bottle is dependent entirely on its temperature, and a cold bottle will make the engine run rich when the system is activated. To bring the pressure up before a run, a lot of racers apply heat from a propane torch. It’s easy, effective, and probably the most dangerous thing you can do to a nitrous bottle short of drilling a hole in it or whaling on the valve with a hammer. The problem is that it’s very easy to accidentally exceed the temperature at which the aluminum bottle is permanently damaged, leading to eventual catastrophic failure of the sort seen in the photo above. It doesn’t happen immediately, and there’s no way to tell that you’ve pooched the bottle until it actually blows up.

I’ve been told that “everybody does it”, “I’ve done it and never had a problem”, “pro teams do it all the time”, and even that it’s just my “opinion” that using a propane torch is a bad idea. Since I have a feeling that this topic will come up again on YB, I figured it would be worth spending some time to spell out the facts. That way I can just link to this post and go on with my life, instead of typing it all over again.

Using a propane torch to heat a nitrous bottle is forbidden by every nitrous kit manufacturer

It’s forbidden by the NHRA and IHRA rulebooks, too

If you get caught doing it at most tracks, the best scenario is that you’ll get your torch confiscated, and the worst is that you’ll be told to leave and not come back

There is always a chance that torching a bottle will damage it, no matter how careful you are

There are other methods of heating a bottle, like a water bath or an approved thermostatically-controlled electric heater, that have no chance of damaging the bottle

When a bottle fails, the release of energy is enough to completely destroy a car, and can conceivably kill anyone nearby

The people at risk aren’t just the racers who torched the bottle, but also include bystanders, other drivers, and even shop personnel simply refilling a damaged bottle

These are not matters of opinion. These are facts. As for opinion, well, there’s a word that perfectly describes the kind of person who risks other people’s lives and well-being for no reason, other than being cheap, lazy, or stupid - that word is “asshole”.

While perusing Dan Rutter’s blog he introduced me to the glory that is DealExtreme. If you want to kill a couple hours looking through all the crazy stuff, just follow the link. It’s kind of hard to describe the mix of stuff - everything from novelty items to USB-powered gadgets and RC airplane electronics. I’ll give you a little taste of a few of the items…

How about a nice Personal Cell Phone Signal Blocker?

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I know I keep posting video links (the lazy man’s way to blog) but doing real work has kept me pretty busy lately. Until I get some time to generate some actual content, please enjoy the following…

In California, even minor car-to-car contact is reason enough for everyone involved to stop right in the middle of the damn road and discuss the situation in great detail, while traffic backs up for miles behind the crash.

In Germany, you just keep driving, apparently…

More importantly, would you buy it from Sears? Sure, it’s “Accurate to +/- 1% of reading from 20% to 100% of wrench capacity. Operates in up to 7 common torque units including in-lbs, ft-lbs, in-oz, Nm, cNm, mKg and cmKg. Allows 99 preset torque values to be programmed into the wrench and manually or automatically advanced during use. Stores up to 1,000 torque readings in memory for extended use before download of data is required. Alternately, the data can be downloaded continuously to a PC during use.” But $2500? And Sears? I’ll stick to “a quarter turn before it strips.”

Update: It’s possible to spend even MORE money on a torque wrench from Sears…

How about a little straight-up F-35B STOVL porn?

The clip’s title is almost certainly a lie - I find it unlikely that you’d make the first test flight in such a demanding regime, taking off in close proximity to obstacles (instead of in the middle of a conventional runway, with nothing around to run into for miles, for instance), then landing while perfectly silhouetted by the setting sun. But we can dream, can’t we?

So the geniuses in San Francisco have decided that the solution to the 30-plus suicides a year from the Golden Gate Bridge is a giant net. Not just any net, either - a $50 million plastic-coated steel boondoggle, and that price tag is just for parts and installation. The best estimate is that the net, which will hang 20 feet below the deck of the bridge and extend out 20 feet to either side, will cost an additional $78,000 a year to maintain (no word on whether that cost includes the labor and equipment involved in fishing jumpers out of the net, or if that’s extra).

Some questions occur to me.

Won’t anybody serious enough about killing themselves to work up the nerve to jump over the existing four foot railing, only to get caught in the net, simply crawl to the edge and fall the remaining, almost inevitably fatal distance to the water below?

Are they planning on making the net sticky or something? Or electrified, to stun the suicider until rescuers arrive?

Won’t those ’saved’ by the net just subsequently punch their own tickets in some other way?

Isn’t this likely to have the unintended consequence of creating a brand-new extreme sport as thrill-seekers hurl themselves off the bridge and into the net?

I have no idea what the projected lifespan of the net is. The bridge itself has stood for 70 years, so assuming that the net has a similar longevity, and the net is 100% effective, taking fatalities from 30 a year to zero, this has the potential to save 2100 people from themselves. At a cost of $55,460,000, or $26,409.52 per life saved. Seems like a bargain when you break it down that way, when you consider that what this really amounts to is a PR campaign. Let’s say that the net really does work, in the keeps-you-from-hitting-the-water sense. It doesn’t really address the issue of why you wanted to jump in the first place, and if we’re talking about planned suicides, as opposed to “what the hell, I’m here, so I might as well kill myself” impulse jumpers, won’t people just go someplace else? Maybe San Francisco would be better off just offering $25 grand in cash to those willing to agree to leave their hearts (and other body parts) elsewhere…